End of tenancy cleaning in and around St Katharine Docks

At St Katharine Docks the inventory clerk almost never starts with the skirting boards. They stand in the middle of the flat, look up at the exposed brick and the timber beams, then across at the floor-to-ceiling glass facing the marina, and that is where your deposit is decided. Those two surfaces are what the check-in report photographed on your first day, and they are what a rushed clean misses. So this clean is built backwards from the clerk’s own list: dock-conversion specific, checklist-driven, £30 per hour per cleaner, with a 48-hour re-clean guarantee measured against the check-out report itself. Ring 0333 555 2076 for a price in about three minutes.

Last updated June 2026. We cover E1W across the whole marina and its riverside fringe, from Ivory House and Commodity Quay round to St Katharine’s Way and Thomas More Street. This page sits inside the borough directory at End of Tenancy Cleaning Tower Hamlets.

How the check-in report decides a dockside deposit

Start with the mechanism, because it is the whole game and almost nobody explains it. When you moved into a flat at the docks, a clerk walked it and wrote an inventory: every wall, every surface, usually with photographs, and on a warehouse conversion those photographs zero in on the character features the flat is let on. The brick was clean. The beams were clean. The glass onto the marina was clear. The engineered oak or the stone floor was unmarked. At check-out a different clerk walks the same flat and compares it line by line against that document. Anything worse than the check-in entry, beyond fair wear and tear, is chargeable against your deposit. You are being marked against a professional clean, and a mop on a free Sunday rarely gets you back there.

The money is not abstract in E1W. On the dockside check-outs we get called in to rescue, the deductions land in a pattern: eighty to a hundred and thirty pounds on the oven and extractor in these integrated kitchens, a similar figure on limescale across the wet room, sixty to a hundred for the gaps behind appliances, and, the one that stings here, a note against the marina glass and the exposed brick because both looked immaculate at check-in and now do not. Set that against a dockside flat carrying a deposit of several thousand pounds and the arithmetic makes itself. Most tenants only run that sum after they have failed the check-out and lost the first round, which is a shame, because the first round is the cheap one to win.

Why is the clerk so exacting on the water at St Katharine Docks? Because the deposit is large, the flat was let as a premium product, and the managing agent is on the hook for protecting the landlord’s asset. A marina-view apartment sitting in a deposit scheme is real money somebody has to account for, so the inspection is genuinely adversarial. The clerk is paid to find faults, not to wave you through. That is not unfair. It just means you turn up with the flat cleaned to the report, not to a general idea of tidy.

What 1 May 2026 changed for E1W move-outs

The Renters’ Rights Act 2025 went live on 1 May 2026. Section 21 no-fault evictions are gone. Every existing assured shorthold tenancy in England has converted to a periodic tenancy, and a tenant can now give two months’ notice at any point in the year rather than waiting for a fixed term to expire.

Here is the part people get wrong. The cleaning side of a move-out did not change at all. The check-in benchmark still applies. Your landlord still cannot make professional cleaning a contractual condition, and never could since the Tenant Fees Act 2019, but they can still deduct for cleaning if the flat comes back below its check-in standard. A converted warehouse one-bed handed back with dust on every beam and a film on the glass is plainly below that standard. The deposit maths is exactly what it was the week before.

What changed is timing, and timing is what bites at the docks. This was already a high-churn corner of E1W: company lets, international lets, City workers on one-year contracts, marina apartments that turn over fast. Let those tenants leave on a rolling two months instead of a fixed end date and the move-outs get more frequent and far less predictable. The practical takeaway is dull and it pays for itself: book the clean earlier than you used to, because the slot you want will be gone if you wait until the last week.

The cleaning side of a move-out did not change at all. The timing did, and at the docks timing is everything.

Where the docks sit in Tower Hamlets licensing

This trips up renters and small landlords alike, so here it is straight. St Katharine Docks sits in the St Katharine’s and Wapping ward of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The council runs a selective licensing scheme, but it covers only four areas: Whitechapel, Weavers, Spitalfields and Banglatown. The docks are not in it, and that selective scheme is due to expire on 30 September 2026 in any case. So a normal single-let marina flat does not need a selective licence.

Two other rules do reach the docks. There is a borough-wide additional HMO licensing scheme, running from 1 April 2024 until 31 March 2029, which covers houses in multiple occupation across all of Tower Hamlets, and the standard mandatory HMO licensing for larger shared houses sits on top of that nationally. If your dock loft is a single household, none of this touches your move-out. If several sharers hold the tenancy, the licence sits with the landlord, not with you, and it changes nothing about the clean the check-out clerk expects. The council does not publish these pages in a way outside tools can read cleanly, so we state the position in plain prose rather than send you to a page that will not load.

The 57 things we work through, room by room

Every booking at the docks runs to a 57-point agent-approved checklist, built over a decade of local check-outs and tuned to what the clerks covering these buildings actually flag. The full list comes with the job, or we walk you through it before we start. It is built for hand-back against an inventory, not for a general tidy. Here is the shape of it.

The kitchen, usually the high-spec weak point

Dockside kitchens are integrated and expensive, which is exactly why a tenant’s own clean falls short on them. The oven is stripped rather than wiped: racks and runners out and soaked, the door glass split apart so the brown film between the panels comes out, and the interior, fan and seals all done. The extractor hood is degreased inside and out and the filter washed or replaced. Hob and any splashback descaled and polished, induction in the newer blocks, gas in a few of the older conversions, each handled its own way. Integrated fridge, freezer and dishwasher cleaned inside and out, seals included, and those built-in units in the newer riverside flats have their own quirks we already know. Every cupboard, inside and out, handles done, worktops and sink finished. Then the appliances get pulled out so the gaps behind and beside them are cleaned, and put back. In a docks kitchen the oven and the extractor take the most time because they are where the deposit usually goes.

The wet rooms, where the water shows worst

Full descale on the shower screen, the enclosure, the taps and the fittings, with a proper scale remover rather than a cloth. Tiles and grout scrubbed, any mould treated. Toilet, basin and bath cleaned and polished, including under the rim, the base and behind the pedestal where nobody looks but the clerk. Mirrors and chrome left clear and streak-free, which on this water takes the right product and a second pass. The extractor vent wiped. Bathrooms in these flats are modern and chrome-heavy, so scale on the screen, the taps and the shower fittings is one of the first things flagged, and it is done thoroughly rather than quickly.

Bedrooms, living areas and the character features

This is where a dock conversion is different from a standard flat, so it gets its own attention. Exposed brick and timber beams brushed down and the settled dust lifted, including the high mortar lines and the tops of the beams where a tenancy’s worth of dust gathers and where you never look. Floor-to-ceiling glass and balcony doors cleaned both sides where access allows, frames and tracks included. Wardrobes and storage cleared and wiped, inside and out. Skirting, sills, switches, sockets, radiators and any picture rail dusted. Engineered oak or stone floors hoovered then mopped or buffed to the right finish, with the edges and the marks where furniture stood given specific attention. Nothing aggressive goes near an original feature the inventory names by hand.

Throughout the flat

Internal doors, frames and handles cleaned. Light fittings and any visible ducting or exposed pipework dusted, which these double-height warehouse spaces have plenty of. Cobwebs removed from the high corners the tall conversions are prone to. The hallway and entrance done, and the concierge-corridor side of your own front door wiped, because in these buildings that is on view too. Hard floors throughout hoovered and mopped, carpets where fitted hoovered, with carpet shampoo available as an add-on. The flat is left so the inventory clerk’s report comes back clean rather than annotated.

On a dock conversion the deposit is not in the corners. It is up on the beams and across the glass.

What 308 ppm water does to a wall of marina glass

E1W is on Thames Water, and the supply here runs at about 308 parts per million of calcium carbonate, roughly 21.6 Clark degrees. That is very hard, well above the England average, and on a riverside flat it matters more than it would almost anywhere else, because the whole look these buildings sell is glass and chrome: floor-to-ceiling windows onto the basin, walk-in showers, polished taps, marina light coming straight through the panes.

Hard water leaves a dull, cloudy film on every one of those surfaces, and an inventory clerk reads that film as “not cleaned”. They check for it deliberately. They look at the glass edge-on against the daylight off the water, they run a thumbnail down the tap, they pull the shower screen in close. A wipe with a cloth does nothing to set limescale. We treat the glass and the wet rooms with a scale remover and a flat blade so the surfaces come back genuinely clear rather than smeared, and that is the single difference between a pass and a note on the report for most dockside flats. The film on the marina glass is the most common one mark we see across E1W, and it is entirely avoidable.

Grout and tile joints are the other place the water shows. Kitchen and bathroom grout is scrubbed rather than wiped, and where a joint is genuinely past saving after a long let we photograph its state before we start, so the clerk cannot bill you for wear that was already there at check-in. That dated photo has settled more disputes than any argument has. Specialist floors sit slightly outside the standard scrub: the engineered oak in the newer blocks and the stone in some of the conversions each take their own product, which is what the hard floor cleaning add-on is for, and the exterior of the marina-facing glass, where the inventory asks for it, is a window cleaning job folded into the same visit.

The docks block by block: the stock changes as you round the basin

St Katharine Docks is small, but it is not uniform. It is a working yacht marina wrapped in buildings from four different centuries, and what the clerk is told to look for changes as you go round the water. One method does not pass all of it. This is roughly how we read it.

Ivory House and the original warehouse stock

Ivory House is the heart of it: the Grade II listed 1850s warehouse on the middle quay, converted to flats decades ago and still the most sought-after address on the dock. These are the classic character conversions, brick and cast-iron columns and timber, and the inventory on a flat like this names those features one by one. The Coronarium and the older converted blocks nearby are the same story. Everything here is done by hand and done carefully, because a scuffed original beam or a smear left on the arched glass is a bigger deduction than a missed oven. The clerks who cover Ivory House know exactly which features the flat is let on, and so do we.

Commodity Quay and the eastern side

Round on the eastern dock, Commodity Quay and the blocks off Mews Street are a different build again: later conversions and purpose-built dock apartments, often with a managing agent and concierge desk that logs your move-out separately from the lettings clerk. Two sets of eyes, two standards to clear. The Dickens Inn stands out in the middle of all this, and the flats looking onto that side of the basin get inspected in full marina daylight, which is unforgiving on glass.

The riverside fringe towards Wapping and the Tower

Along St Katharine’s Way and Thomas More Street the stock turns to 1980s-to-2000s dockside new-build and modern riverside apartments running down towards the Tower Hotel and the river. These come with tighter, more corporate inventory checklists, engineered floors and integrated kitchens, and building rules about lift use and the service entrance that slow a move-out down if you have not planned for them. West and north of the dock you are quickly into Wapping and up towards Tower Hill and Tower Gateway, and the warehouse-conversion character carries straight on: we cover the next stretch of it at Wapping High Street. The mansion-flat and marina-side blocks scattered between the lock and the Dickens Inn round out the picture.

Not sure which building you are technically in, or whether your block counts as the docks or as Wapping proper? It rarely matters for the clean, but ring 0333 555 2076 with the address and we will tell you what the clerk who covers it tends to mark.

What it costs, and the sum nobody runs until check-out day

The docks run at our standard London pricing: £30 per hour per cleaner, with kit, products and travel included. Those figures assume a flat in normal lived-in shape. A long company let with heavy wear, a pet household, or somewhere that has not had a proper clean in three or four years costs more, and we say so on the phone rather than after. There are no surprise lines on the invoice, and no premium added because the building has a concierge and a marina view. Studios start at £156, one-beds at £207, two-beds £243, three-beds £339 and four-beds £425. By the hour it is £30 per cleaner. Carpet shampoo, where a flat is carpeted rather than oak or stone, is £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed. Oven cleaning is already in the end of tenancy price; as a standalone it runs £77 single, £110 double, £114 for a 90cm range.

Now run the sum the way the deposit makes you. A one-bed conversion at £207 to protect a deposit of two or three thousand pounds is not really a decision. Every booking here carries a 48-hour re-clean guarantee: if the clerk flags any cleanliness issue within 48 hours, we come back and redo it free, provided you tell us inside that window and nobody has moved in. Our first-time pass rate across these jobs sits at 97%, but the guarantee is the point, because a failed check-out on a flat where deposits start high is not a small thing to shrug off. Over the years this work has helped tenants recover £1.2m in deposits that would otherwise have gone on cleaning deductions, and we are on the books of 300+ letting agents, so in most cases we already know the report format your agent uses.

An Ivory House job from March

“I moved out of a one-bed in Ivory House after fourteen months, just me, working long hours in the City so the flat was tidy but never properly deep-cleaned. What the clerk had photographed at check-in was the exposed brick, the beams and the film on the floor-to-ceiling glass facing the marina. Two of them spent most of their time on exactly those things, the brickwork and the glass, and left the oak floor spotless. I got the full deposit back with no argument from the agent. Best money I spent all year.”
Priya, Ivory House E1W, March 2026

That job is a fair example of the pattern at the docks. It was not a dirty flat. It was a flat let on its character features, handed back against a report that documented those features, and the clean had to answer the report rather than just look clean at a glance. What turned it was the slow work on the brick and the glass plus the dated photo set that went out with the invoice, which is the part most do-it-yourself check-outs never have when the agent pushes back.

Booking it, and the concierge-and-lift problem

Booking is simple, but the docks add one wrinkle most flats do not: getting the team and the kit into the building. Ivory House, Commodity Quay and the riverside blocks mostly run a concierge desk, and the lift often needs booking in advance for a cleaning team with equipment. Sort that when you book and the day runs smoothly; leave it and you lose an hour on the doorstep. The steps are these.

1. Ring 0333 555 2076. Give us the block, the flat size, the E1W address and your check-out date, and mention anything the check-in report marked as a feature: the brick, the beams, the marina glass, an oak or stone floor.
2. We confirm a fixed price from the figures above. No survey, no padding once it is agreed.
3. Tell us about access: which building, the concierge arrangement, and whether the lift needs booking for the team. We coordinate that with the desk so there is no delay on the day.
4. Flat empty when we arrive. Furniture out, personal things gone, rubbish cleared, so the clean is complete. We also do removals if you want the move and the clean on one booking, which helps at the docks where van access and loading times are tight.
5. We clean to the 57-point checklist, photograph every room before and after, and you or the agent walk it through against the inventory. Anything cleaning-related flagged inside 48 hours, we come back and put right free.

One honest note on timing. Month-end is when dockside check-outs cluster, the same few days everyone’s tenancy seems to end, and those slots go first. For an end-of-month move give us a week to ten days if you can; mid-month is usually three to five days. We do take short-notice slots when there is a gap, but the docks turn over fast, so do not leave it to the last morning.

Add-ons and the areas next door

A move-out at the docks often pulls in more than the core clean, and it is worth booking the right thing. If only part of the flat is the risk, book the part. There is a dedicated oven cleaning service for when the kitchen is the only thing the agent flagged, carpet cleaning for shampoo and stain work on a carpeted flat, window cleaning for the marina-facing glass, and hard floor cleaning for engineered oak and stone. Furnished company lets sometimes need upholstery cleaning rather than a hoover.

People mix up three different jobs, so plainly.

Check-in inventory report

The document the clerk writes on day one describing every surface and feature, with photos. It is the benchmark your check-out is judged against, which is why we clean to it and not to a generic idea of clean.

End of tenancy clean

Built to pass that inventory and get a deposit back, against the letting-agent benchmark, with the flat empty and the 48-hour guarantee on it, at £30 an hour per cleaner.

Deep clean

A deep clean is the same depth of work for a flat you are staying in: no inventory, no clerk, no guarantee tied to a report, also from £30 an hour.

Regular domestic clean

A domestic clean is ongoing upkeep, week to week, from £22 an hour.

We work the ground around the docks too, which matters when your next flat is one over. The warehouse character runs straight on at Wapping High Street, and the borough picture for the whole of E1W and its neighbours sits at End of Tenancy Cleaning Tower Hamlets.

Questions we get asked

How much is end of tenancy cleaning at St Katharine Docks?

A studio is £156, a one-bed £207, a two-bed £243, a three-bed £339 and a four-bed £425. By the hour it is £30 per cleaner. These are the standard E1W prices, and a concierge building with a marina view does not change them.

Do you guarantee the clean against the inventory check?

Yes. There is a 48-hour re-clean guarantee. If the inventory clerk flags anything cleaning-related within 48 hours of the clean, we return and put it right free, as long as you tell us inside that window and nobody has moved in. We hold a 97% first-time pass rate, so it is rarely needed.

What is the 57-point checklist?

It is the agent-approved list we clean every flat to: 57 specific items covering the kitchen, the wet rooms, bedrooms, living areas and everything throughout, written around what inventory clerks at the docks actually mark on a check-out report, including the brick, the beams and the glass.

Can you handle exposed brick and timber beams in a warehouse conversion?

Yes, and in these Ivory House and Commodity Quay conversions it is the whole job. A tenancy’s worth of dust settles into the mortar joints and along the tops of the beams where you never look. We brush it down and lift the dust rather than just sweeping the floor beneath it, because that brickwork is what the check-in photos will be compared against.

The marina glass has a cloudy film on it. Will that come off?

It will. That film is limescale from the hard Thames Water supply, about 308 ppm here, plus general grime. A wipe does nothing to it. We use a scale remover and a flat blade so the floor-to-ceiling glass comes back genuinely clear rather than smeared, which is the most common single mark on a dockside flat.

Do you clean the oven and extractor?

Yes, both are in the end of tenancy price. The oven is stripped inside including the door glass, racks and runners, and the extractor is degreased with the filter washed or replaced. In a high-spec integrated dock kitchen these are almost always the weak points of a tenant’s own clean.

How do you get into the building on the day?

Tell us the block and the concierge arrangement when you book. In Ivory House, Commodity Quay and the riverside blocks the lift usually needs booking in advance for a team with equipment, and we coordinate that with the desk so there is no hold-up when we arrive.

Is carpet cleaning included?

Carpets are hoovered as standard. Shampoo and stain treatment is an add-on: £36 a bedroom, £43 a living room, or £115 for a whole two-bed. Many dock flats are engineered oak or stone rather than carpet, so it is often not needed at all.

Does my flat at the docks need a selective licence?

Not for a normal single-let flat. Tower Hamlets selective licensing covers only Whitechapel, Weavers, Spitalfields and Banglatown, and St Katharine Docks is not in it. Sharer households can fall under the borough-wide additional HMO scheme, but that is the landlord’s licence and it does not change your check-out clean.

How far ahead should I book?

As early as you can once your check-out date is set, especially around month-end when moves at the docks cluster on the same few days. We do book short-notice slots when there is a gap, but these buildings turn over quickly, so do not leave it to the last morning.

What if the agent still tries to deduct for cleaning?

If we cleaned it and the clerk marks something within 48 hours, we come back, so there is nothing legitimate left to deduct. If a deduction is still attempted unfairly, your deposit scheme runs a free adjudication, and Shelter’s guidance walks through disputing it. Our dated invoice and photo report are admissible evidence.

Are you insured and a real company?

Yes. Monster Cleaning Ltd, Companies House 9919639, trading since 2014. You get a fixed price from the figures above before we start, with no survey fee and no extras added once it is agreed, and payment is on completion. Ring or email [email protected] to lock the slot.

Get a price

Call 0333 555 2076 and we price the job in about three minutes. The block, the flat size, the check-out date and any features the check-in report named, that is the lot. Out of hours, send us a message and someone calls you back first thing. A couple of photos of the kitchen, the wet room and the marina glass sharpen the quote. And if your check-out at the docks is tomorrow, ring anyway and we will do what we can. That is how 97% of these pass first time, and how £1.2m in deposits has come back to tenants who would otherwise have lost it.